In U.S. Pat. No. 3,529,598, a urine drainage bag support member is disclosed, being made of a single bent wire having a vertical body, with hooks at both ends thereof. An inlet tube retaining portion is positioned at an upper end of the hanger, in which the bent wire is proportioned to form a tube-holding eye, communicating with a throat defined by the bent wire, to allow sliding of the flexible tubing through the throat into the eye.
This structure has been used extensively in conjunction with urinary drainage bags with success, but certain disadvantages have existed.
The tube-holding eye portion of the bent wire of the prior art has, on occasions, tended to cause the tubing to kink, restricting fluid flow through the tubing. When this happens, the nurse must readjust the arrangement of the tubing in the eye carefully, so as to avoid such kinking.
As a further disadvantage, while the structure of the prior art hangs effectively on rectangular bed rails and the like, its performance is not as desirable on cylindrical bed rails, as are found on modern hospital beds, particularly when the bed is in elevated position and the cylindrical rail not horizontal. In that case, sometimes the prior art bag hanger tends to slide.
Also, when a patient using a drainage bag is ambulatory, he desires to hang the bag on a chair leg brace or the like. The prior art hanger structure is inconvenient for that purpose, being often prone to falling off.
The improved hanger of this invention for urinary drainage bags and the like is preferably a somewhat-resilient, plastic structure, in which the hanger member defines an acute angle to the general axis of the body of the hanger structure. This, coupled with the resilience of the structure, provides a hanger structure which can grip under tension a cylindrical bed rail or another structure as desired, thus holding the drainage bag in vertical position, without danger of falling off and with less possibility of undesirable sliding along the rail.
Furthermore, the tube retaining eye defined by the structure of this invention includes an enlarged flange, providing an enlarged flange surface area to grip the tubing which is retained therein. Accordingly, kinking of the tubing, and the resultant blockage of flow, is greatly reduced.
The hanger members of this invention are also less expensive than their prior art metal counterparts, and eliminate the need for rubber end tips that have been utilized on the commercial version of the prior metal structures, to avoid tearing bags and packaging by the ends of the wire rods from which the prior art hangers were made.